17 October 2017

We released an update of its Web Call Server 5 media server to work with Safari 11 in iOS and MacOS. The update allows developers to create streaming broadcasting apps, video chats, video calls and other web applications that work directly in Safari 11 browsers from Apple on iPhone and iPad.

A week ago, new iPhones were released along with iOS 11 – a notable event. This release among everything else has brought one more important thing to developers: the Safari browser received long-awaited support for WebRTC.

Think for a minute: millions of iPhones and iPads all over the world suddenly learned to play real-time audio and video in a browser. iOS and Mac users can now enjoy full-functional in-browser video chats, live broadcasts with low (less than a second) real-time latency, calls and conferences and more. The road was long, and now we are here.

Here is the task: several users need to watch a video on YouTube simultaneously, with latency as low as possible.

WebRTC can work Peer-to-Peer and Peer-to-Server, where the peer is usually a browser or a mobile application. In this article we describe how WebRTC works in the Server-to-Server mode, what this mode is for and how it works.

VOD corresponds to video on demand, as in playing video on YouTube or any other streaming service. WebRTC is real time low latency video. What is common between these two you may ask? Welcome.

We all know how to embed a usual player for video (VOD – video on demand) to the page. Typically, this is an HLS player that loads the content piece by piece via HTTP and plays those fragments using the native HLS engine. The native HLS player is peculiar for mobile browsers in iOS and Android platforms. On desktop browsers, HLS players work via Media Source Extensions or using Flash Player.

Media Source Extensions (MSE) is a browser API that allows playing audio and video using the corresponding HTML5 tags: audio and video

In order to play a chunk of audio or video, we need to feed this chunk the corresponding element using MSE API. It is MSE that HLS players are based on. HLS fragments are passed to MSE and played by the player.

Amazon S3 is a cloud file storage that many popular online services like Dropbox and Trello use. Even though there was a downtime in February 28, 2017 resulting in massive outages of online services even including fridges somewhere, S3 is, arguably, the most popular cloud-based storage today and millions of users, both individuals and businesses store their images, video, backups and other content there.

Web Call Server is a media server that supports the WebRTC technology and can record video streams from browsers and mobile devices. And HTML page in the browser or a mobile app can capture a video stream from the web camera and send it to the server for rebroadcasting and recording.

In this article we describe how you can record a video stream on a page opened in Google Chrome followed by sending the resulting mp4 file to the Amazon S3 storage.

Let’s say we have 10 users who stream video from web cameras via WebRTC. We need to display thumbnails of their streams on one page.

In this article we demonstrate 7 technologically different ways to display a video stream from an IP camera with RTSP support on a web page in a browser.

As a rule, browsers do not support RTSP, so the video stream is converted for a browser using an intermediate server.